the committments

Modernism in art had the tendency to idealize form at the expense of the human and communal. What of those who resisted? Do what extent can a respect for the human experience give an aesthetic strength to resist submerging itself in the experience of form which was what occurred in cubism? But, if the resistance too much toward the sentimental, there is the sensation of loving without actually loving someone: narcissism. Sentimentality is not a transaction and sentimentality if actually true love, is needed to represent love and not mere sexuality; Picasso’s default position. Its blurry line between sacrificing spirituality, and the debate as cubism stormed the world was whether this coldness of formalism suggested a failed humanity.

Soutine. The Mad Woman. 1919. ---In Kuspit’s reading of Schapiro, "to be modern is to be alienated from one's received identity." Qualities that might otherwise be considered deficits become assets from the perspective of modern art. They come to define not only the creative artist, but also the kind of art history that Schapiro himself practiced and the place of Jews within it.--- Read More:https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/Baron_intro.pdf image:http://www.artexpertswebsite.com/pages/artists/soutine.php

Paris 1908. On the one side, you had a cherishing of the human figure, a practice rooted in the Old Masters. Chagall, Soutine, Modigliani. The harmonious, the suave, the traditional, the sentimental.A world of pathos that does not cross the threshold of destroying dignity. At some point there has to be a moral in the art, a moral commitment. At the other pole are the wild demoiselles of Picasso and his followers: bodies flattened, a contempt for the human figure; intentional distortion to deny the organic and spontaneous. aaa aaa

---Accordingly, Kuspit plumbs the “Jewish unconscious” in Schapiro’s work, which he locates in a particular disposition arising from the alienation built into Jewish existence. It is not Jewish solidarity—and certainly not subservience to orthodoxies of any kind, including Jewish ones—that captures Schapiro’s imagination, but the dissidence of a Jewish minority in a Christian world. This disposition is marked by “creative survival against all odds,” heterodoxy, and an ability to hold contradictions in suspension. To characterize this condition as alienation is to index the failure of modernity to alter the fundamentals of the Jewish condition, while valorizing the Jewish predicament and identifying it with the situation of the artist and modernity itself.---Read More:https://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/web/Baron_intro.pdf image:http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/2011/05/scale-of-heart.html

—I submit that for Modigliani and Soutine the Old Masters were wise Old Jews, knowledgeable about the world without sacrificing their spirituality to it. Indeed, the Old Masters, who often dealt with Biblical themes, symbolize the antiquity of Judaism, which originates further back in time — almost at the beginning of time if one is to believe the Old Testament — than Greek antiquity, and thus is more fundamentally human. The Jewish sense of the human is ancient compared to modernist formalism (which is inherently short-lived by reason of its limited goals): why should the latter take precedence over the former, rather than vice versa? Thus Modiglianis and Soutines love of the Old Masters suggests their nostalgic Jewishness, indeed, their refusal to deny their Jewishness in modern society — in anti-Semitic Paris, barely recovered from the Dreyfus affair (1906). For Modigliani and Soutine there was clearly more to lose by abandoning their Jewish roots than to gain by becoming modernists…. aa

Modigliani. Portrait of Marevna. ---One may recall that the first commandment requires one to love God -- love is the important human word here. It is a moral injunction: loving God one comes to love the human beings who are Gods creation. To love human beings means that one does not destroy them, even in the name of art, as Picasso does. It may seem absurd to say so, but in a sense from a Jewish point of view his formal analysis of the figure is a crime against humanity. It cannot help reminding a Jew -- Modigliani -- however unconsciously of the persecution of the Jews and their dehumanization and distortion into grotesque devils. It may be artistically progressive and revelatory, but it is also humanly regressive and malevolent.--- Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-04.asp image:http://www.reproarte.com/picture/Amedeo_Modigliani/Portrait+of+Marevna/7613.html

….It is noteworthy that Chagall, Modigliani and Soutine — all the peintres maudits — have been called sentimentalists, but if so they are not as cursed as they have been said to be.— Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit7-27-04.asp

ADDENDUM:

Picasso’s Demoiselles was certainly a shocking work in 1907. Does it justify Donald Kuspit’s interpretation? Probably. The figures in it are basically  it is a vicious, evil characters regarding at the scene with vigilance and apprehension.The transaction.  The figure at the bottom right  is a symbol of a dark, bestial madness. The face of the figure on the left,  suggests the loss of will. She has become an automaton responding to the dark power which inhabits the figure at bottom right. Compelling in the sense of a representation of illicit love.

Here, Picasso’s invokes a sordid reality , the puss beneath a pretty veneer. The moral being that the sex trade  is evil and destructive  and will ultimately lead to madness. Picasso would argue that he is dealing in truth, something higher than love and necessary for love to exist. He is asserting that even cold transactional sex fall under the purview of moral laws, and furthermore, that technology and modernism require a revamped conception , something the Old masters could not have foreseen.Picasso is Baudelaire’s “flaneur” , but, when sex is indulged in without love of  person it is unnatural and therefore destructive, but no worse than the sentimental narcissist. And he’s right.

---While Schapiro was unequivocally Jewish, he rarely mentioned Jews in his work. Exceptions include a laudatory essay on Marc Chagall’s Bible paintings and a critical assessment of Bernard Berenson, the great connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art, who converted from Judaism to Christianity and had nothing good to say about Jews and their artistic capacities. Berenson became Schapiro’s Other. A man of questionable provenance himself, Berenson became the great authenticator of artists whose provenance was questionable.--- Read More:https://www.nyu.edu/c

es/bkg/web/Baron_intro.pdf image:http://notesdemusees.blogspot.com/2008/11/quimper.html

Critics are generally deaf to these moral implications as they too are subject to the prejudice that art is about sexual liberation and must tell us that you are happy when you have sex as you please. This has never been true and as art illuminates truth it cannot tell us that sex is not subject to moral laws. On the contrary, critics insist on the stylistic importance of the work. They have already decided that Cubism is Picasso” great achievement and so they see the “Demoiselles” as Picasso’s first step towards Cubism.Read More:http://paulscaman.ifrance.com/

---The result of months of preparation and revision, this painting revolutionized the art world when first seen in Picasso's studio. Its monumental size underscored the shocking incoherence resulting from the outright sabotage of conventional representation. Picasso drew on sources as diverse as Iberian sculpture, African tribal masks, and El Greco's painting to make this startling composition. In the preparatory studies, the figure at left was a sailor entering a brothel. Picasso, wanting no anecdotal detail to interfere with the sheer impact of the work, decided to eliminate it in the final painting. The only remaining allusion to the brothel lies in the title: Avignon was a street in Barcelona famed for its brothel.--- Read More:http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79766

So, it may be a bit too simplistic to say that his paintings aim to disrespect women.The aim may or may not be intentional. But, the disrespect is certainly present, perhaps the provocative gesture to represent a rupture with artistic tradition.   Picasso’s female figures are invariably ugly, fearful, and terrifying; a certain desire to scorn women. There has been arguments made that his work  can and does imply something deeper: a humane consideration of them as more than just sex objects. Plausible. There is certainly a mystery over obscuring of facial features, a masking of identity, but whether its a sign of respect is unclear.  Anonymous victim or to protect them from the male gaze and Picasso’s own fears and fantasy’s?

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